You've just graduated from college and your anticipated job has disappeared into the black hole of the recession. You've moved back in with your parents--for only a few months, you assure yourself. Your monthly student-loan payments are looming. Apart from hiding under the covers in your childhood bed, what can you do?

First, it helps to know that you're in good company: A new survey of 1,200 college grads and soon-to-be grads by the employment website Monster.com found that 71 percent anticipate living with their parents because of limited financial resources and 31 percent predict that they'll be doing so for at least a year.

Alexandra Eastburn, 24, wound up doing just that. She graduated from the University of Colorado in 2008 hoping to pursue a career in journalism. Eastburn knew it would be tough, so for the first few months after college, she applied for any job available--waitress, secretary, paralegal--to make ends meet. After six months, ends unmet, she returned home to Mom and Dad in Doylestown, Pa.

Eastburn is disappointed, but not surprised, at how hard it has been. "My parents prepared me," she says. "They told me a job is not just going to show up. But some of my friends were completely blindsided." After 15 to 20 interviews, Eastburn still hasn't landed a job, but at least she has concrete career goals and a plan to pursue them, unlike many of her peers.

Graduates often come out of school "without clarity," says Lisa Orrell, a business coach for 20-somethings and the author of Millennials Into Leadership. She suggests--perhaps predictably--that these novice job seekers consider contacting someone in her field for help. A career counselor can assess an applicant's strengths and interests, help sharpen a résumé, assist with interview preparation, and brainstorm networking ideas. It's a good idea to look into local community colleges as well--vocational counseling is sometimes available to non-students through a school's extension programs.

Some collegians envisage graduate school as a way to escape the uncertain job market. But Tamara Draut, vice president of policy and programs for the think tank Demos, cautions against pursuing an advanced degree solely as a way to sit out tough economic times. "If it's free, it's fine," she says. "And if you've dreamed of becoming a lawyer or doctor or social worker, then yes, you need to go to graduate school." But it's a bad idea, she warns, to take on more debt for "self-exploration with no endgame."

If you are clear on the career you want to pursue, consider writing a blog with interesting tidbits and news about the industry or field. "It's not that time-consuming, and you're positioning yourself as an entry-level go-to person in that area," Orrell says. Or you can put together a podcast (check out podomatic.com for ideas). Call up the head of a company--you don't have to start with a Nike or a Microsoft--and ask for a 20-minute interview to find out how he or she got started. "You're coming to them with something that strokes their ego, and you'll be on their radar," Orrell says. "When you're interviewing elsewhere as well, you'll be seen as a young person who has kept current on the industry."

It may sound like a long shot, but stranger approaches have worked. Jamie Varon graduated from the California State University (Chico) in 2008 and was looking to join an innovative start-up company in San Francisco. "I went into what-the-hell-will-I-do mode," she says. "I had sent out so many résumés to Monster.com, Craigslist, everywhere." So one night in a burst of energy and ambition, she created Twittershouldhireme.com. In a short time, her website went viral, and Varon's story appeared on CNN and in Fortune magazine. She had lunch with the folks at Twitter, and although a job never panned out, the publicity surrounding the site attracted interest. With encouragement from a newfound mentor, Varon began a freelance Web design business and--no mean feat--is supporting herself in San Francisco.

Managing Debt

Among other expenses, Varon is making enough to cover her monthly student-loan payment, something that many graduates struggle to do. According to the College Board, in 2007-08, 62 percent of students receiving bachelor's degrees from public four-year institutions graduated with an education debt; of those who borrowed, 43 percent owed $20,000 or more. The numbers were still worse for those graduating from for-profit four-year schools: 80 percent owed at least $20,000.

The key here is to avoid default, and there's plenty of information available on programs that can help by lowering monthly payments. Last summer, for example, a federal program called Income-Based Repayment, or IBR, was launched to help make payments on federal loans affordable for those with limited incomes. Another option is public service forgiveness. Again, this applies only to federal loans, but if you work for 10 years in the government, as a teacher, or for a qualified nonprofit, your loan will be forgiven--and the 10 years don't have to be consecutive. In addition, short-term deferrals are available if you've enrolled in school or are facing temporary hardship, such as unemployment. Forbearance is also an option; it's easier to get than a deferral, but be aware that interest will continue to accrue.

If you need help repaying a loan, educate yourself before making a move. Deanne Loonin, director of the National Consumer Law Center's Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, stresses that it's not enough to know the right questions to ask your lender: You also need to know whether you're getting the correct answers. Luckily, there are plenty of good websites with the information and tools you need to calculate your costs, including the Education Department's studentaid.ed.gov and the nonprofit sites finaid.org and projectonstudentdebt.org.

Living at Home

Many young people returning home to live with their parents fear that they're losing their independence. But it's important to realize that dependence and independence aren't the only possibilities, says Rick Settersten, a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University. Ideally, your family can achieve the happy medium of interdependence, which means living with your parents as a responsible adult, not as the teenager you were when you left for college.

Eileen and Jon Gallo, Los Angeles consultants who specialize in family and money issues, offer a four-step program to lessen the anxiety of returning to the bosom of your family. First, you should determine what your responsibilities are: paying rent? doing chores? Second, decide what you are going to do to earn money in the short term: Will you take a part-time job if you can't find a full-time one? Third, settle on steps to pursue a career: vocational counseling? internships? And finally, the big question: When are you going to leave? All of these elements can be renegotiated as circumstances require, the Gallos note, but all should be clearly spelled out up front.

It's also important to recognize that the whole moving-back-home trend may not be just an economic blip but part of a broader social reorganization. Settersten, who co-authored the upcoming book Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood and Why It's Good for Everyone, notes that in the first few decades of the 20th century, many young men and women continued to live at home into their early 20s. It was only after the postwar boom enabled those with a high school education or less to find good employment that "marriage and childbearing took place almost in lockstep with the conclusion of schooling."

It would be wrong to say that moving back in with one's parents is the new normal--the numbers don't bear that out yet. But it's possible that society is returning to a time when becoming an adult was a more gradual process, with young people waiting until they were economically self-sufficient to leave the roost for good. The reasons have changed--100 years ago, many families were tied to farms and agricultural jobs, while today they must cope with an uncertain job market--but it may well be that, as Settersten suggests, "for most young people, whether by choice or circumstances, adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends."

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The former California governor called President Trump’s attacks on the late Arizona senator “absolutely unacceptable.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain saw in each other a willingness to buck the Republican Party and became fast friends and political allies. Mindful of McCain’s legacy, the former California governor said on Wednesday that he couldn’t stay silent in the face of President Donald Trump’s recent spate of attacks on the late senator.

He told me that Trump’s swipes at McCain are both disgraceful and destructive. “He was just an unbelievable person,” Schwarzenegger said. “So an attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he’s alive or dead—but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to do that. I just think it’s a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level. We will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain’s example, because he represented courage.”

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” writer William Gallagher concluded.

A plant virus distributes its genes into eight separate segments that can all reproduce, even if they infect different cells.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among virologists that a single virus, carrying a full set of genes, must be in want of a cell. A virus is just a collection of genes packaged into a capsule. It infiltrates and hijacks a living cell to make extra copies of itself. Those daughter viruses then bust out of their ailing host, and each finds a new cell to infect. Rinse, and repeat. This is how all viruses, from Ebola to influenza, are meant to work.

But Stéphane Blanc and his colleagues at the University of Montpellier have shown that one virus breaks all the rules.

Faba bean necrotic stunt virus, or FBNSV for short, infects legumes, and is spread through the bites of aphids. Its genes are split among eight segments, each of which is packaged into its own capsule. And, as Blanc’s team has now shown, these eight segments can reproduce themselves, even if they infect different cells. FBNSV needs all of its components, but it doesn’t need them in the same place. Indeed, this virus never seems to fully come together. It is always distributed, its existence spread between capsules and split among different host cells.

Just because some people allegedly cheated the system doesn’t mean the system is defensible.

Like most other college presidents, R. Gerald Turner, the head of Southern Methodist University, where my son is a student, sends correspondence only when something goes terribly wrong. When I received a mass email from his office this week, I assumed the school had gotten caught up in the fallout of Operation Varsity Blues, the college-admissions cheating and bribery scandal that came to light last week.

But Turner’s missive turned out to be preemptive instead of apologetic. The scandal offered SMU “an opportunity to add to the ongoing review of our process,” he wrote. The university, he explained, must rely on the accuracy of materials submitted by students, including SAT scores. Turner announced that the university intended to review the records of any students associated with “The Key,” the college-counseling firm run by William Singer, the alleged fixer who is accused of paying bribes, facilitating cheats, and creating fraudulent materials to help wealthy parents get their kids into elite schools such as Stanford, Yale, and the University of Southern California.

As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram.

When Alex, now a high-school senior, saw an Instagram account he followed post about something called QAnon back in 2017, he’d never heard of the viral conspiracy theory before. But the post piqued his interest, and he wanted to know more. So he did what your average teenager would do: He followed several accounts related to it on Instagram, searched for information on YouTube, and read up on it on forums.

A year and a half later, Alex, who asked to use a pseudonym, runs his own Gen Z–focused QAnon Instagram account, through which he educates his generation about the secret plot by the “deep state” to take down Donald Trump. “I was just noticing a lack in younger people being interested in QAnon, so I figured I would put it out there that there was at least one young person in the movement,” he told me via Instagram direct message. He hopes to “expose the truth about everything corrupt governments and organizations have lied about.” Among those truths: that certain cosmetics and foods contain aborted fetal cells, that the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash was a hoax, and that the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings were staged.

Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know. Then DNA testing came along.

Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.

The first Facebookmessage arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

When the two strangers accosted Chelsea Clinton, she was attending an NYU vigil for the Muslims murdered by a terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand. “This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,” one declared as the other recorded the encounter. “I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that deep down inside. Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there.”

The accuser’s blend of callous indignation and extravagant nonsense brought to mind charges that Chelsea’s parents murdered Vince Foster or that her mother committed treason when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked. But these critics weren’t right-wingers parroting talk radio. They were leftist NYU students.

“Floods and hurricanes happen. The hazard itself is not the disaster—it’s our habits, our building codes.”

Historic flooding in the Missouri River and Mississippi River basins has ravaged much of the Midwest in recent days. Nebraska and Iowa bore the brunt of the devastation, but rivers in six states at more than 40 locations have reached record levels. The swollen rivers have made short work of the levees that surround them, blasting through or over the tops of 200 miles of earthen barriers in four states. At least three people have died, and hundreds of homes and structures have been destroyed. The Nebraska Farm Bureau estimates farm and ranch losses up to $1 billion in that state alone.

Should we call this a natural disaster?

Labels matter, even—perhaps especially—in times of emergency. Calling the midwestern carnage a natural disaster neatly absolves us of responsibility, and casts us as hapless victims of an unpredictable and vengeful Mother Nature. Far better to draw a distinction between natural hazards and human-induced disasters. According to Craig Fugate, a former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “Floods and hurricanes happen. The hazard itself is not the disaster—it’s our habits, our building codes. It’s how we build and live in those areas—that’s the disaster.” This is not a call for blame, but a call to arms to learn from the past to keep ourselves out of harm’s way.

The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”

But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.

They rely on murderous insincerity and the unwillingness of liberal societies to see them for what they are.

The coward who gunned down 49 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand left behind a white-nationalist screed rationalizing his mass murder as a necessary act to preserve the white race.

The manifesto is striking for its trolling—its combination of fanaticism, insincerity, and attempts at irony. The killer was particularly obsessed with the idea of “white genocide,” a term that does not actually refer to mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or even violence, but to the loss of political and cultural hegemony in countries that white supremacists think should belong to white people by law. The theory of white population decline is innumerate nonsense; as The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb writes, the conspiracy is a kind of projection, a paranoia that the past genocide, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing forced on the West’s former subjects will be visited upon it.